Outlines of Knowledge

Notes:

A=Arms Length

D=Direct

G=Government run or directed

R=Regulatory

S=Strategy

*=Community Ownership option?

Knowledge and Purpose

One of my own projects over the next decade is to both “download” what I have learned so any more widely valuable “tacit knowledge” or "institutional knowledge” (from things I have been involved with)  is not lost but also to then “upload” it to the web in various ways so it is retained for the use of others. In the era of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) that means that any unique and different collections of knowledge/information are networked up so a future AI may well reconstruct many prior groupings of different aggregations of interests and lateral thinking, which appeals to me as the only possible “after life” to my rational atheist mind!:) 

The announcement of the historic shift in human population replacement rate this year indicates a potential future decline in Human population: https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1873551841021329489

This won’t happen for a little while due to life expectancy extending & offsetting the dropping replacement rate so our current 8 billion as of 2023, would now peak in a band at around 9.2m to 11.5m (UN latest figures suggest a median of 10.3m) in the 2076- 2084 period and most likely decline to a median figure of 7.5m by 2300, though the forecast banding for that median suggests the figure could be between between 2m & 26m people:  https://populationconnection.org/blog/study-projects-human-population-up-to-2300/# 

More recent Chinese studies suggest China could lose 59% of its population far quicker than this https://x.com/JesusFerna7026/status/2013262261771440490 and could suggest a potential global population of 3.2m later in the 22nd century, however African population decline might not happen until after 2100 and that may offset things as first Europe & then East Asia decline in population. Indeed most of Africa and part of central Asia are the only places above Replacement rate now: https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1883604016380457254 

At the same time another reason for an overall lower estimate than the 7.5 billion 2300 median figure is that African fertility rates are themselves already dropping faster than the predictions of just over a decade ago https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1874416508253954189 

More of the drivers of the change at this excellent video here: https://x.com/EdConwaySky/status/2074090158756917307 

I have started to speculate on some of the more radical long-term implications & policy choices of that population decline here https://x.com/charliemansell/status/1873761104628949503 and explore why Elon Musk and his far right mates are wrong with their “decline of civilization” narrative due to low birth rates. Nevertheless even less hard line assessments assume a shrinking human population is a bad thing bearing in mind we only crossed the 3 billion human barrier in 1960 and 4 billion barrier in 1974 yet in developed countries at the time the Gini inequality co-efficient was at its most equal and we had even been organised enough to put people on the Moon by then! https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time 

Reframing this issue is to speculate that of the 117 billion people who have ever lived (with perhaps a third sadly dying before the age of 5 and a fifth before the age of 1 in the last 190,000 years) calculated here https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/# 

those of us in the most recently born 10+ billion who have lived and had an online presence may find our very individually different online footprint data scraped in future by an AI into a wide range of maximally humanised AI “synthetic personalities” in the next century (all based on the slightly different recorded choices made by past real humans, rather than just create them via random connection) for the benefit of a potentially declining human population to better interact with in their likely engagement with far more of a mix of humans and AIs. The religious right may well be waiting for the “Rapture” but secular rationalists are perhaps instead waiting for the “Upload”?:) 

In the last 3 years there has been the rise of “Thanabots” designed to allow people to keep talking to deceased relatives based on data about them: https://bigthink.com/the-future/thanabots/ which by late 2024 even had a TV programme about various elements on their development https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0024hnl/storyville-eternal-you from the more reassurance aspect for afterlife believers and fortune teller aspects to the future. 

If people think the above is just idle speculation all our 650 MPs are already being turned into AI’s for political wargaming purposes and that datascraping will likely expand using the living (raising a whole host of ethical questions) and the dead: https://x.com/daisyeastlake/status/2003769871906070916 

There are now AI/Avatar former US Presidents answering questions from their far less impressive successors https://x.com/clashreport/status/2072394124129395192 

This is on top of the Abba avatar holograms and Elton John signing a multi-million contract to perform after he is dead: https://x.com/MetroUK/status/2072345033718513955 

AI actors (made up of 3 AI systems working together) now get interviewed on TV programmes: https://x.com/adamcurtisbroll/status/2099651283925741760 

Combining the all this together will likely see people of the past increasingly presented not in history books but as holographic/AI characters a bit like something out of the Stat Trek Holodeck

AI is also already being used for behaviour change programmes such as Personal Trainers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c04vk5z92veo 

We should also note how human interaction with AI’s let alone Robots and Japan with its far more rapid decline in population may be pointing to big future trends: https://x.com/Reuters/status/2001268644131598795 and this is a now important debate in its own right: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/28/could-ai-relationships-actually-be-good-for-us but also raises a large number of new issues as this book review explains https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/13/love-machines-by-james-muldoon-review-the-risks-and-rewards-of-getting-intimate-with-ai 

The question posed here is what if world population perhaps declines to its pre-1974 levels in the next 100 to 175 years but at the same time many day to day interactions are conducted with billions of invented AI chatbots but also more interestingly with perhaps 10-20 billion or more synthetic personalities based on the real choices and experiences, good and bad, of humans whose entire life has been online and then been data scraped? Bearing in mind the speed of AI and robotics technology will the world really feel emptier than its current 8.3 billion rising to a 10.3 billion peak in 2084 if it were down to 3 or 4 billion humans? 

My view is the “Attention Economy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy (something I first really discovered at the bookshop for the Tate Gallery Alter-Modernism exhibition in 2009 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/altermodern ) will actually be even more intense for the smaller number of humans with a far larger numbers of artificial intelligence agents (both new, but many also “familiar” over what may be a slightly longer lifespan) to interact with. 

As an aside who controls the Attention Economy may become more of an issue after the January 2026 launch of:

• the Attention Manifesto https://penguinrandomhouselibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Final_FRIENDS_Attensity_HC_manifesto.pdf 

• and Attensity Book https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/478341/attensity-by-attention-the-friends-of/9780241810965 

• and Toolkit https://assetbucketpublic.7169.prh.com/9798/217/086/153/sales-assets/9798217086153_ATTENSITY%20Toolkit.pdf 

• by the Friends of Attention group: https://friendsofattention.org/ 

• who have written an article here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-defend-ourselves-from-the-new-plague-of-human-fracking 

• Whilst another article on the launch is here: https://observer.co.uk/style/features/article/the-lost-art-of-paying-attention 

No surprise perhaps that some countries are now debating social media bans for the under 16s.

However, getting back to the earlier points: in the present the many forms of “curation” we all do from our day to day social media activity or even more structured attempts like this almanack could quite possibly become more important to our smaller number of descendants of the next century than some of us may actually realise? 

Perhaps a concept for us to prepare for in the future is any revelation that more people actually are preparing for a “Post-Life” online legacy of the individually unique collection of their experiences and thoughts being something their descendants but others more widely draw from. We may be long past the more mystical/prophetic “Oracles” of the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle 

but perhaps algorithms may be unintentionally creating unique accumulated collections of past personal knowledge/experience experienced by individuals to be mined in the future? What will we call that then?

In conclusion, this population decline described above also generates both future political divides (some deeply embedded in the human psyche like pessimism and optimism) that we are already seeing now with the rise of futurists like Elon Musk and also means we may face potential new policy choices. It's a long-term area that I will continue to add more about the issues that arise in future almanacs.

An Example Outline of Knowledge I have created

This is historically and process sequential as well as covers my interests on social change

To be added

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Have a good and safe 2026!

Regards

Charlie Mansell

Email: charlie.mansell@gmail.com 

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